Describe the new client acquisition process from lead to quote to policy.

After someone fills out the online form and receives an online quote, they are contact by one of our in-house life insurance specialists. At that time, a full needs analysis is done right over the phone to make sure that our client applies for the right amount of life insurance coverage, the right term length, and with the carrier that represents the best value for their particular needs. The client then receives and signs the application and takes a life insurance exam. That information is returned to the insurance carrier where the application goes through an underwriting process. At the end of the underwriting process, assuming that something doesn’t come up that makes the client uninsurable per the carrier’s guidelines, the policy is approved. The client then confirms delivery of the policy and the policy is put in force.

How do you track progression thru this process?

Every step of the process is tracked through our data warehouse and extracted through our OLAP program.

How do you tie back a policy to the marketing tactic that generated the lead?

Whenever a lead is created (either online or through a phone response to our advertising), the lead source is captured and put into a column in our data warehouse. This remains attached to the lead record.

How do you account for policies from people that were exposed to multiple marketing messages? What types of attribution rules do you set? What tools do you use to help you with cross-channel attribution?

Currently we use last click attribution for online, but we’re moving towards an “assist value” attribution model.

Without sophisticated attribution measurement, does search get too much credit?

We’ll see if this is the case when the attribution model is put in place in early 2010.

Please describe your offline marketing efforts and how those are tracked.

It’s tracked through unique toll free numbers for each campaign.

How do you create a culture of tracking and testing internally?

As a direct marketing organization, it’s part of our DNA.

What results can you share in terms of the lift in marketing performance due to your robust tracking, analytics, and optimization?

With our multivariate testing, we’ve seen lifts in site visit to lead conversion of more than 60% in relatively short periods of time.

In less than 140 characters, what’s the single most important thing you’ve learned from Google?

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